Emerson’s bouts with ill health during his time at Harvard Divinity School meant that he never formally graduated. But on October 10, 1826, his combined class work and independent theological study qualified him to be officially licensed, or “approbated”, to preach. First, however, he followed a prescribed remedy for recovering from tuberculosis: prolonged exposure to sea air and sunshine. With funds from his Uncle Samuel Ripley, Emerson sailed south in late November. The distance and solitude of this first long trip away from his native New England proved creatively unsettling. True to form, personal and professional questions constantly preyed upon him, but as he searched for answers, his sense of self and an idiosyncratic Romantic faith were taking shape. In Charleston, South Carolina, in early January, he
81 “Observations on the Growth of the Mind”, Sampson Reed: Primary Source Material for Emerson Studies, compiler George F. Dole (New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1992), 82 Sermon CXI, 28. CS 3: 127.
pondered the nature of Jesus in journal notes that would become the seeds of a later sermon. Humanity’s “moral depravity” mocked the crucified Christ;
nevertheless, Emerson felt that one may “enter into a sublime sympathy with him”.83 Emerson still felt his own inadequacy as a “moral agent”, noting that a life of virtuous purpose seemed to be slipping away, and he frankly questioned his ability as a “young pilot” to guide others through the “shoals”
of life.84 Also unsettling was his ironic experience of participating in a Bible Society meeting in St. Augustine, Florida, while just outside the window he heard the shouts of a slave auctioneer. Emerson noted: “One ear … heard the glad tidings of great joy whilst the other was regaled with ‘Going gentlemen, Going!’”85 This cultural disconnection of morality from the market trading of blacks clearly remained alive in his consciousness before he publicly joined his ethical concerns with the cause of emancipation.
Despite these doubts about himself and his role in the church, Emerson’s first exposure to Southern culture helped strengthen his self-confidence. At home, he wondered whether he could meet leadership challenges. In strange locales, thrown upon his own resources, he found it cathartic to meet others quite different from himself. On the first leg of his return voyage in late March, Emerson traveled with Achille Murat — a nephew of Napoleon, “a consistent Atheist”, a man who owned a plantation outside Tallahassee and thus an experienced slaveholder.86
1.22 Achille Murat (1801–1847).
83 JMN 3: 63–64.
84 JMN 3: 72.
85 JMN 3: 117.
86 JMN 3: 77. On Emerson and Murat, see also Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 74–77, 225.
Despite heavy weather during the trip, the unlikely friends challenged each other in long conversations. Murat, the non-believer, responded to Emerson’s ideas of liberal religion; and Emerson, hardly the intimidated provincial, gained confidence as he held his own and also quizzically admired this sophisticated companion who, shunning any faith, was yet evidently an ethical man, although he owned slaves.
In a famous phrase in “Self-Reliance” fourteen years later, he would call traveling “a fool’s paradise”.87 But this trip was arguably life-saving;
it improved his health, exposed him to a new world of believers and non-believers beyond Boston, and began to free him from certain self-doubts.
Preaching at St. Augustine, Charleston, Washington, Philadelphia, and New York, he returned home with a stronger self-estimate, theological conviction, and renewed vocational purpose. Borrowing imagery from the psychological and maritime turbulence he had recently undergone, he now told his journal, “When the Sea was stormy the disciples awoke Christ. Let us do so.—”88
The Jesus awakening within Emerson, however, was not the conventional Christ, a mere mediator between God and humanity. This was clear when, once back in Boston and starting his career as a supply minister — substitutes for pastors on the odd Sunday — he gave a sermon in late June 1827 based on the Pauline text “We preach Christ crucified” (1 Corinthians 1:23). Omitting the issue of Christ’s divinity, he praised him for restoring humanity to God. He portrayed Jesus as a complete, exemplary man, who despite enduring agonies of persecution and suffering, accepted God’s will and thus became history’s great spiritual hero.89 Emerson’s focus on the combination of Stoic and God-directed courage in Jesus was a goad to himself and a criterion for his later biographical subjects. With conviction, Emerson now preached a feeling of impregnable spiritual centeredness. Already in March, writing from St. Augustine to Mary, he had hinted of such a sense: “[W]e can conceive of one so united to God in his affections that he surveys from the vantage ground of his own virtues the two worlds with equal eye &
87 The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 10 vols., eds. Alfred R. Ferguson, et al.
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971–2013), 2: 46. Hereafter CW.
88 JMN 3: 82.
89 CS 1: 85–92. See Mott, “‘Christ Crucified’: Christology, Identity, and Emerson’s Sermon No. 5”, in Emerson Centenary Essays, ed. Joel Myerson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 17–40; incorporated in Mott, “The Strains of Eloquence”: Emerson and His Sermons (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 9–33.
knowing the true value of the love & praise of men challenges rather the suffrages [support] of immortal souls”.90 By the very act of discerning eternal truth, he believed, the hero overcomes the world’s hypocrisy, pride, and viciousness.
Churches throughout eastern Massachusetts — including his father’s former congregation, Boston’s First Church — and into New Hampshire often called on Emerson to be their supply pastor. On Christmas Day 1827, in Concord, New Hampshire, he met the sixteen-year-old Ellen Tucker.
She was beautiful, religious, poetically inclined, vivacious, and fun-loving, but frail. Ellen was already clearly showing signs of consumption, a family malady, when they were engaged the following December. Within months, on March 11, 1829, the Second Church (Unitarian) in Boston’s North End ordained Emerson its junior pastor to serve under the popular and eloquent Henry Ware Jr. But the ailing Ware had to retire in July, the next year becoming a professor at Harvard Divinity School.91 Emerson now became the sole minister of a venerable church that was once led by Increase and Cotton Mather and counted Paul Revere among its former members. On September 30, Waldo and Ellen were married in New Hampshire, and then took rooms near the church on Chardon Street.
1.23 Ellen Louisa Tucker at 18, 1829.
90 L 7: 159–60.
91 Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 398, and William R. Hutchison, The Transcendentalist Ministers: Church Reform in the New England Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 12.
1.24 Emerson at about 26, c. 1829.
Emerson’s ministry in the late 1820s and early 1830s — long overshadowed by the emphasis on his more famous lectures and essays of a decade later — profoundly shaped him as a thinker and writer.92 Although he based each sermon conventionally on a biblical text, Emerson admired Jesus as a deeply human prophet and was never rigidly dogmatic. Incorporating secular themes and allusions in his preaching, he made the most of the expressive freedom encouraged in the Unitarian pulpit and began to articulate themes he would revisit throughout his career: the importance of self-reliant character based on moral law, the dynamic quality of individual life within a limitless cosmos, the relationship of the citizen to the nation, and the ultimate value of discerning the truth for oneself.
Above all, he was exploring the reality of the “God within”, a concept he derived from widely diverse sources: Marcus Aurelius, the Pauline epistles, the French cleric Fenelon, and the Romantics, as well as from Mary and the Society of Friends’ founder George Fox. As a supply minister in New Bedford in 1833–1834, he would be greatly impressed by the principle of
“acquiescence”, expressed by Quaker Mary Rotch, which would help him to clarify the God-dependence, or deep selfless quality of “self-reliance”.93 Later, mystic writers in the Islamic, Hindu, and Confucian traditions would
92 See David Robinson, Apostle of Culture: Emerson as Preacher and Lecturer (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982); Mott, “Strains”; and Susan L. Roberson, Emerson in His Sermons: A Man-Made Self (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995).
93 JMN 4: 263–64, and Richardson, 157–63.
strengthen his sense of the omnipresence of a World Soul, another curb to excessive individualism.
Except for a few sermons prepared for purely ceremonial occasions, Emerson was preaching on topics that deeply mattered to him.
1.25 New Brick, or Second Church, Boston, 1843.
He was also learning to address a live, intellectually demanding audience, tending to the congregation’s pastoral needs, serving on several church committees, and generally becoming a public leader in a manner he had previously thought impossible. He also took on community responsibilities, acting as both chaplain of the State Senate and an elected member of the Boston School Committee. He extended his contacts and made friends, among them Abel Adams and George Adams Sampson, both merchants, parishioners at Second Church, and confidants whose decency persuaded Emerson that virtue and success in commerce were not necessarily incompatible.
The range of topics on which Emerson preached at Second Church and throughout the Northeast testifies to the flexibility allowed in the Unitarian pulpit. It also reflected Emerson’s passionate quest to discover the unity of all knowledge, linking both heart and head, and thus blending belief with intellect. Never merely focused on theological matters, Emerson was fascinated by any subject vital, or even tangential to, right living:
history, biography, the arts, or science. In Boston in 1827, he saw “a skilful experimenter lay a magnet among filings of steel & the force of that subtle fluid entering into each fragment arranged them all in mathematical lines & each metallic atom became in its turn a magnet communicating
all the force it received of the loadstone”.94 In another sermon in mid-July 1829, he drew a spiritual analogy to this experiment: “If you introduce a magnet into a heap of steel-filings the rubbish becomes instantly instinct with life and order … The mind is that mass of rubbish … until its hidden virtue is called forth when God is revealed”. Nature, “full of symbols of its Author”, mirrors God’s laws. Emerson is already moving beyond rigid Swedenborgian correspondences to a dynamic, organic concept of mind.
Any sign, he insists, is “but a faint type of the power of this idea upon the soul of man”. Reading nature symbolically is only a preliminary stage of revelation, for God “manifests himself in the material world … in the history of man … in our own experience”.95 In short, until we directly experience God, we are dead to other divine manifestations.
In this sermon Emerson makes an important break from traditional Unitarian norms for establishing authentic religious belief. Since ancient times, several spiritual traditions had sought laws in nature as evidence of God’s handiwork. English philosopher William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802) had been in wide currency for a quarter century as the standard work of “natural religion”. Paley had presented an “argument from design”. Invoking an old metaphor, he had concluded that the world, like a watch, implies a maker. Close study of such disciplines as anatomy and physiology, he reasoned, enabled one to draw inferences about God’s nature and plan. This book and other works by Paley remained basic texts for Harvard undergraduates into the 1830s. Emerson, however, had come to regard Paley’s kind of evidence as unconvincingly secondhand: it separated the laws of God from God’s living power.
Emerson wrote his 1829 sermon on natural religion in a logical, reasoned way, carefully numbering his main points.96 In style, his vision of intuitive personal experience as the best evidence of God differs from the scintillating, poetic, demandingly impressionistic manner of his later essays; nevertheless, it anticipates the primary thesis of his first book, Nature (1836). There he would argue that immediate, private perception
94 JMN 3: 93.
95 CS 2: 20–21.
96 Commentary on this sermon includes Mott, “From Natural Religion to Transcendentalism: An Edition of Emerson’s Sermon No. 43”, in Studies in the American Renaissance 1985, ed. Joel Myerson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985), 14–26 (revised in chap. 3 of “Strains”) and Laura Dassow Walls, Emerson’s Life in Science:
The Culture of Truth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 159. For an extensive discussion of Emerson’s interest in electromagnetism, see Eric Wilson, Emerson’s Sublime Science (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999).
itself could be divine revelation. In a later sermon with a more cosmic perspective, he reasoned that the vast scope of astronomy, far from undercutting religious belief, provides a corrective to narrow, idolatrous views of our place in the universe and of God’s scope. Just as Copernicus had shown that the earth plays a subordinate, satellite role to the sun, so our world’s microcosmic size in relation to an infinite universe should discourage spiritual and moral arrogance. Such a change in perspective does not threaten belief, Emerson argued, but rather stimulates a grander sense of God, not as a mere “governor”, but as “an Infinite Mind”.97
1.26 View of Boston from the South Boston Bridge, c. 1820–1829.
Whether preaching on the nature of Jesus or on scientific and moral law, Emerson tried to cultivate in his audiences an inner sense of the divine.
But such awareness did not lead him to argue for passive introspection.
Spiritual insight, he felt, must translate into daily, public activity. Their connection formed the bridge between ideals and reality that prompted him, even at this early date, to support abolition in principle, although he did not yet join that nascent movement. Emerson welcomed the radical antislavery minister Samuel J. May, later the father-in-law of his future friend Bronson Alcott, to speak from his Second Church pulpit. And in
97 Sermon CLVII, CS 4: 158.
April 1832 — fifteen months after William Lloyd Garrison founded the Boston abolitionist newspaper the Liberator — Emerson preached a Fast Day sermon insisting on the moral obligation to resist government-sanctioned injustice. “Let every man say then to himself — the cause of the Indian, it is mine; the cause of the slave, it is mine; the cause of the union, it is mine; the cause of public honesty, of education, of religion, they are mine; and speak and act thereupon as a freeman and a Christian”.98
Emerson’s burst of directed energy and his growing confidence as a preacher developed alongside severe crisis and eventual tragedy.
Throughout 1830, Ellen continued to suffer from lung hemorrhages.
(Emerson’s younger brother Edward, now in New York practicing law with William, was also showing tubercular symptoms.) On February 8, 1831, a numb Emerson recorded in both his journal and church records the death of his beloved wife.99 On the 20th, crushed by “miserable debility”, as he described his state, he groped for words to express his loss in a sermon on grief.100 The loss of Ellen intensified his search for new, less doctrinal grounds for faith. “All is miracle”, he asserted in his journal the month after her death, “& the mind revolts at representations of 2 kinds of miracle”.101 For a time, he mechanically carried on with his preaching and pastoral tasks, while every day walking the two miles to Ellen’s tomb in Roxbury.
After a year of this practice, in January 1832, he privately noted, “It is the best part of the man, I sometimes think, that revolts most against his being the minister”. Eleven days later he challenged himself, “Write on personal independance [sic]”.102 Mary understood such deep malaise, yet anxious that the family’s clerical tradition not be broken, she encouraged him to hold on to his noble profession.
But the depth of Emerson’s torment is suggested by a stark journal entry of late March, well over a year after Ellen’s death: “I visited Ellen’s tomb &
opened the coffin”.103 The act of viewing a deceased’s remains, while not a common custom, was not particularly ghoulish or bizarre in New England.104 Emerson described nothing more about the incident, either what he saw or felt.
98 CS 4: 115.
99 JMN 3: 226, CS 4: 302.
100 JMN 3: 226; Sermon CVII, CS 3: 101–05.
101 JMN 3: 242. On Emerson and the problem of Christian “evidences”, see Mott, “Strains”, 53–78.
102 JMN 3: 318, 320.
103 JMN 4: 7.
104 See Richardson, 3–5, and Ralph H. Orth, “Emerson’s Visit to the Tomb of His First Wife”, Emerson Society Paper 11 (Spring 2000), 3, 8.
But he had been meditating and preaching on mortality. Confronting once and for all the finality of Ellen’s death, while simultaneously remembering her fervent belief in their reunion in an afterlife, Emerson asserted a belief in life here and now.105 That summer, while thinking of what he might preach the next Sunday, he noted that true religion lies neither with church doctrines nor sacramental practices. Rather he strongly affirmed, “It is a life … a new life of those faculties you have. It is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble”. In mid-September 1832, he was even more explicit on this theme, jotting down a motto: “‘Think of living’. Don’t tell me to get ready to die. I know not what shall be. The only preparation I can make is by fulfilling my present duties. This is the everlasting life”. By opening up a new path beyond grief, this focus on the present could temporarily eclipse doubts about an afterlife.106 The question of immortality, however, would be an unresolved issue about which he would speculate for the rest of his life.
Emerson now came to realize that except for the pleasure of writing sermons, pastoral duties no longer appealed to him. He filled his journal with fundamental doubts about his profession: “I have sometimes thought that in order to be a good minister it was necessary to leave the ministry.
The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers. Were not a Socratic paganism better than an effete superannuated Christianity?”107 Emerson’s concept of being “a good minister”
shows both his insistence on integrity and a continuing appreciation of the prophetic role of preaching. But in the wake of losing Ellen, he now associated the ministerial vocation with an equally corrosive kind of death.
In early June, only two months after viewing Ellen’s remains, Emerson invited leading members of the congregation to his house. He wished to explain his objections to administering the sacrament of Communion, and he took the opportunity to announce a radical idea: why not simply dispense with the rite? On the 21st, a church committee sent him their report. It recognized that people of conscience differed over the nature of the Lord’s Supper but stated that the church would not change its custom.108 On the very same day, carrying William Sewel’s The History of the … Quakers and the second volume of Thomas Clarkson’s A Portraiture of Quakerism, Emerson left with Charles
105 Richardson states that “The loss that darkened his life also freed him. Ellen’s death cut Emerson loose” (Richardson, 118).
106 JMN 4: 27; 40–41.
107 JMN 4: 27.
108 CS 4: 292–95.
to visit his oracle, Mary, on her farm in Waterford, Maine, with its inspiring mountain views. After going on to New Hampshire’s impressive White Mountains with Waldo, Charles returned to Boston; Mary joined Waldo at Crawford Notch but departed abruptly. Left alone to ponder his literal and personal prospects, Waldo noted, “The good of going into the mountains is that life is reconsidered”.109 He was reconsidering nothing less than the painful and complex intersection of private, professional, and doctrinal issues. In this
to visit his oracle, Mary, on her farm in Waterford, Maine, with its inspiring mountain views. After going on to New Hampshire’s impressive White Mountains with Waldo, Charles returned to Boston; Mary joined Waldo at Crawford Notch but departed abruptly. Left alone to ponder his literal and personal prospects, Waldo noted, “The good of going into the mountains is that life is reconsidered”.109 He was reconsidering nothing less than the painful and complex intersection of private, professional, and doctrinal issues. In this